I believe in animal research. But it’s time to draw a line

Imagine, for a minute, that you’re a frog — a pro-science frog. You’re so pro-science that you’ve decided to donate yourself to it. You sign the consent forms, climb into the barrel and await your fate.

It’s all quite exciting, you think, as you travel the bumpy road to the lab. A huge sacrifice, but a chance to expand the shores of human knowledge. You might be part of a cure for cancer, or the common cold, or help to eliminate polio. Finally you emerge — and for the first time, a doubt does too.

You’re in a lab, sure, but instead of scientists, there are children everywhere — all dissecting frogs. ‘Dissecting’, though, is a loose description. One seems to have ripped the leg off his and stuck it down his neighbour’s shirt, in what surely can’t be a variable-controlled way. Another is carefully copying a diagram straight from the textbook. In the heading a third has misspelled the word ‘frog’. Slowly it dawns on you that your death might not be furthering the spread of knowledge after all. You have laid down your life, in fact, to make biology ‘fun’.

I’ve overstretched the conceit, haven’t I? If you were a frog about to be dissected in a classroom, you’d almost certainly be dead on arrival. But the thing is that animal use in education is not just morally questionable, but pointless. There are so many other ways to teach the same lesson. Boring ways, perhaps. A diagram on the board doesn’t quite have the same pizzazz as a bloodied heart on the table. But we manage to tempt kids into maths and geography without a Babes in the Wood trail of small furry corpses up to the classroom door. Why not science?

While we’re at it, we don’t need animals for undergraduate experiments, either, because they’re not discovering anything new.